Debuting a new book about former President Ronald Reagan, former top aides said that the policies of President Obama have led to slow growth and a reversal of the Gipper’s “peace through strength” policies that stifled American foes and crushed the former Soviet Union.
Former Attorney General Edwin Meese and former CIA and FBI Director William Webster said that Reagan is fondly remembered and often invoked by GOP presidential candidates because his policies revived the nation’s economy and foreign policy.
“More and more people are appreciating what he did,” said Meese in unveiling Reagan Remembered, a collection of stories pulled together by former Reagan ambassador Gilbert A. Robinson.
Edwin Meese and author Gilbert A. Robinson.
“He was really an agent of change,” Meese said of his former boss.
“We have a laboratory case in this country of Ronald Reagan’s policies versus the opposite,” said Meese, turning his guns on Obama.
“I would say that President Obama on the four key areas that I mentioned, taxes, regulation, stable monetary policies, growth of government, has gone 180 degrees in the opposite direction. And so we have a laboratory test of Ronald Reagan’s policies, which resulted in great economic growth, versus the lack of recovery essentially and the very slow economic growth we have at the present time,” he added.
Former President Reagan at the Berlin Wall. AP Photo
Turning to national security, the long-time aide said, “Ronald Reagan’s ‘peace through strength’ is now countered with reducing our armed forces and we see the problems that we have today.”
And, Meese said, “The same is true I think with the confidence of the American people.”
Webster explained separately that Reagan had high admiration for his former Vice President George H.W. Bush’s loyalty and refusal to take any position that challenged Reagan when he ran for president.
In an apparent reference to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, he said that Bush “never contested or challenged, unlike what we’re hearing [with] today’s potential candidacy, the works of his boss and he had never in the Cabinet meeting or any public session offered a different view.”
Meese was asked why so many Republican presidential candidates try to copy Reagan’s policies.
“One of the reasons why so many people are trying to invoke the Reagan image, if you will, on the Republican side at least, is because they have such a great contrast between what Ronald Reagan did and what’s happening at the present time,” he said.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
